Indentured Servants Reincarnated As Indebted Students (Financial Follies Proceed)

I Have A Degree! Why Not A Job?

I Have A Degree! Why Not A Job?

A (black) grad has demanded, after two years of unemployment, that the student loan be forgiven. President Obama has suggested such a program, though he did not suggest how to pay for it, college loans now in the trillion range.

One may feel some sympathy for the hapless two-year, commercial career college graduate, fresh out of public high school and uneducated in either the world or in how to think. He was promised that he is entitled; he is only trying to collect on that promise. But the worth of political promises is not on the curriculum of a public high school. Au contraire!

So our student took the money from the lenders that he assumed was his due, sat in classes for two years and now finds himself a drug on the market. As he is assured at every turn that such things are not his responsibility, unfairly imposed upon him by a discriminating society, he claims justice at other’s expense.

His education has not equipped him to appreciate that all the defaulted loans will be repaid, with interest, by taxpayers or if not, by the bankruptcies of failed lenders. If he were informed, he would not associate that with the economic collapse looming ahead of us. In a very real way uneducated, he is a lost cause. So are all his white and Hispanic confreres. They have bought the famous Pig in a Poke.

Higher education was once a sanctum for scholars and the well off. Noting that grads did well economically, politicians sold degree possession as a replacement for scholastic ability, loading colleges with inept and uncaring students now seen as of little economic worth but with lots of government-inspired money.

To keep the money, colleges dumbed down the courses where they could.  Now, growing numbers of such grads are seeing themselves unemployable. Well, except perhaps as public school teachers. Most dumbfounding of all, these grads go out seeking work burdened with student loans resembling the indentured servitude of yore.

It was all a con in the first place, like the race-based bussing of Los Angeles schoolkids assuming that the minority of good schools would make good students of all the kids. Rather, it destroyed the good schools. Even Liberal Democrats couldn’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear. Pleasant or no, that remains a human reality. Or, you may lead the horse to water; you cannot make him drink.

We held a full time job in college to finance our education and we graduated (with considerable relief) without debt. Before, of course, the government became involved. Fewer manage that now. And commensurately fewer find, we surmise, commensurate employment.

It is bad enough that government has robbed a generation of students of a decent career; it is worse that their parents have voted themselves an additional trillion dollars of debt on top of what is readily visible. The American economy seems likely to be a long time recovering and perhaps, unrecognizable to us by the time that it does.

We know well that we are among lonely voices crying in the wilderness. Most depressing though, is the prospect if we see clearly.

About Jack Curtis

This entry was posted in Economics, Education, Government and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s